Article
CPSA Statement re ICTSF World English Sprting Championship, Kelmarsh 13 -16 July 2017
CPSA Statement re ICTSF World English Sporting Championship,
Kelmarsh, Northants, 13-16 July 2017.
The Board, at its scheduled meeting on 2nd August, discussed at some length the various issues surrounding the above competition and agreed the following statement.
Firstly, the Association would like to apologise to any participant who found the event fell short of their expectations. Having run extremely successful CPSA World Sporting championships previously this was very disappointing.
This championship was hosted by the CPSA on behalf of the International Clay Target Shooting Federation (www.ictsf.global) and it was decided to run the event on a green field site which is usually attractive to many competitors. The links provided by the successful Kelmarsh Game Fair held on the same site were hoped to bring in additional exhibitors, as well as tried and tested infrastructure, along with the CPSA’s Trade members to add to the atmosphere of the event, but clearly this did not materialise as anticipated.
The weather played a very significant part in leading to the dissatisfaction expressed by a number of competitors, and others, on social media. Whilst the first day of competition ran well things changed dramatically overnight and Friday presented us with a potentially unsafe situation on one stand. The ICTSF Jury met and decided, reluctantly but in the interests of participant safety, to withdraw the stand from the competition. Later in the day, following representations from a number of competitors, it was decided by the Jury to remove a second stand in the interests of fairness given said stand was dramatically easier to shoot on Friday than it had been on Thursday. In this instance the Jury decided, rather than just withdraw the stand, to allow competitors to shoot the stand but award everyone a maximum score of 10, it being a 5-pair stand, thus not adversely affecting anyone’s standing in the score rankings. It was further decided by the ICTSF Jury, in the interests of equality, to hold a Semi-Final comprised the top 12 from both the Thur/Fri and Sat/Sun rotations. Ideally this would have been extended to the Classes and Categories also but, regretfully, time constraints on Sunday evening rendered this impracticable.
We have carried out a thorough de-brief, as we always do following major events, taking all available comments and feedback into account and, with the benefit of hindsight, we would have managed certain aspects differently. In future, we will specify more user-friendly toilets of the trailer variety – gender specific and with running water. The direction signage round such greenfield sites needs to be bold and clear to enable people to find whatever they are looking for. The trade stands area was disappointing in number but, given the footfall on any one day was circa 400 competitors plus friends, relatives etc, the general consensus from the trade was the investment in terms of staff, travel, accommodation etc was not likely to be offset by any return achieved. Kelmarsh Estate is used regularly for various shows and we made approaches, via credible intermediaries, to try and attract local traders from other, non-shooting, activities. Regrettably, the fact our footfall was so relatively low thwarted that initiative also.
In the near future we will be carrying out a survey amongst the CPSA member competitors at Kelmarsh as constructive feedback can only serve to enhance our future competitions.
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10th August 2017.